ADAM WARLOCK

In Fantastic Four #66–67 (1967), four scientists of the Enclave completed their masterwork inside the island Citadel of Science they called the Beehive: an artificial superman grown to be the forerunner of a perfect new race. They never saw him. The being they called only "Him" radiated such blinding light that his makers fled his chamber without learning what he looked like — so they stole the one artist who could perceive him safely. They abducted Alicia Masters, the blind sculptor, and carried her to the Beehive to model his likeness by touch.

First, the Enclave tested her hands: given their electroni-blade, Alicia carved a granite block into a perfect bust of one of the scientists in minutes. Then she was led to the chamber where Him lay in his cocoon, in his final metamorphosis, and she reached him as he was about to emerge — the closest any human being came to witnessing Adam Warlock's birth. His emergence came with energy discharges that began bringing the Citadel down around them; one of his creators died in the collapse, and Alicia escaped moments before Him fully emerged, judged his makers evil, and destroyed the Beehive behind him as he flew into the sky.

The scene holds the whole character in miniature. The Enclave built the perfect man as an instrument of control, yet the only person who could perceive him at all was a woman they had kidnapped — and what her hands found in that cocoon was not a weapon waiting for orders. "Him" would drift on to Counter-Earth, take the names Adam and Warlock, bear the Soul Gem and spend decades as the cosmos's most reluctant messiah. But his first portrait was made by touch, by a prisoner, because everyone with eyes was blinded by him.